SciShow Tangents - Farming

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week, always is science expert sari riley hi and our resident everyman sam schultz hello you said i took hello from you now you laughed when i went you know what i went back and reviewed the tapes and i was wrong yeah it felt weird saying hi i regretted it as soon as it came out right now missoula montana is experiencing a winter storm that the the uh hyper reach automatic text system has been like warning me about for two days straight it's been like don't just be ready it's gonna get real bad it was 36 degrees this morning it's gonna be six degrees uh tonight it's a pretty quick drop and I don't love it. Everything was wet and melted and now it's going to be a solid sheet of ice.

Starting point is 00:01:10 Yeah. And it was a beautiful morning. It was like one of the nicest mornings we've had in forever. I like watched the sun go behind the cloud and I was like, goodbye, I'll see you in five days. Oh no. It's a long, long winter. It's a long time. I would like to ask you two where I should be right now. It's a long, long winter. It's a long time. I would like to ask you two, where I should be right now? It's obviously not here. This isn't suitable for humans. It's going to be the only place suitable for humans eventually. Yeah, you don't got that coast to worry about. I think we need to stick right here, unless the volcano explodes. And in that case, you know. Yeah, we'll be fine and by fine

Starting point is 00:01:46 i mean dead quickly we'll be atoms yeah do you think that you think i should stay right here no i don't sarah give me a better answer where should i go go to butte mont beautiful butte montana they got a taco bell cantina almost no it opened, it opened. It opened. It's open. They don't have their liquor license yet, but they're working on it. Okay, then it's not a cantina. Then that's a Taco Bell. That's a Taco Bell. It's a regular old Taco Bell.

Starting point is 00:02:14 Oh, I don't know. You could go to Argentina. That seems nice. Maybe. Like different flora around you. Yeah. A little closer to the equator. I'm going to pick up Sam by the scruff of his neck.

Starting point is 00:02:29 I'm going to pick him up like this, take him out of my computer, and be like, hi, Sam. And he's going to be like this big. He's like four inches tall. And I'm going to be like, where are you going to go, little buddy? He's going to say, Cabo. And I'm going to sort of throw him all the way to Cabo. Yeah, okay. I just want someone to do that to me.

Starting point is 00:02:45 Throw me to New Zealand, where it's summertime right now. You sound like a man who's been awake for three days in a row. We are recording this right after Project for Awesome. Which, and I have to say, thank you so much to everybody

Starting point is 00:02:57 for supporting the Project for Awesome. And everybody who got this SciShow Tangents butt facts zine, that is so worth every penny. can't i i hardly even heard about it i'm so excited that it exists i just hey it doesn't quite doesn't quite exist yet but it exists in our minds and our hearts uh-huh you made a lot of work for yourselves that's the project for awesome is really about about doing things that your future self will regret it might be two hours from now might be will regret. It might be two hours from now.

Starting point is 00:03:26 It might be 12 hours from now. It might be 12 months from now when I'm still making Hankler fish art. Every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together to try to one-up, amaze, and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank bucks, which I will be awarding as we play. And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. But first, as always, we have to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sari.

Starting point is 00:03:55 Grab that shovel with your arm. I'm gonna teach you how to farm. Plant some seeds to grow some corn or beans or watch out that has thorns this field here is for flowers and that one next door is fruit tree land we have cows and goats and such with rabbits sleeping in that hutch feed them groom them help them grow our grass and weeds they do mow chores from dawn till dusk and then sleep and do them all over again. While Stardew Valley's lots of fun, real life business takes a ton of work in science and tools and luck. And also sometimes you drive a cool truck.

Starting point is 00:04:36 Very literal. Every farmer has a cool truck. I couldn't get out of my head the idea of grabbing a shovel with my arm, like how that would work exactly. I just kept thinking like, does it stick to it or do I have to get in the crook of the elbow? Yeah. And then like, I don't know why I'm doing it this way today.

Starting point is 00:04:58 You've been a farmer for a long time. Like a buddy-buddy. In a cartoon, it would be me like going side to side with a little shovel. This guy. The topic is farming, which is, oh boy, what is farming? Oh no. I thought it was going to be easy, but now I don't think it is. That is my thought process and why I went with that for the poem.

Starting point is 00:05:22 Just things that I think of when I think of farming. Because there isn't really a precise definition as far as I can tell farming is kind of like agriculture and even that has loose boundaries and I feel like the best way to describe it is if you as a business or for money or on like a larger scale or or yeah i guess it can't just be like a backyard situation just for me that's not farming i think that's a garden that's that's garden a small farm you help nurture living things animals plants bacteria question mark can you farm bacteria probably sounds right in my in my brain that people then use or eat in some way what if i'm not human and i'm an ant and i create i cut leaves and i take them back and i grow fungus on them now i'm a subsistence farmer, but I'm an ant. So I think the real problem here is the distinction between a garden and a farm. And to me, that's how important it is to you.

Starting point is 00:06:34 If you can get rid of the garden and that was like, oh, that's a bummer, then you're not a farmer. But if you get rid of the garden and you're like, this is a big problem for me and my family, you're a farmer. It's not a it's not a sharp line but it's something it's something that draws draws a line somewhere and i think that like many words we invented farming to apply to humans and then when we saw animals doing agriculture we were like yeah that's kind of farming those look like little

Starting point is 00:07:02 farmers to me and that's where it gets kind of nebulous. Right. Because we are taking, like saying happy. That's a human thing. Is there a dog happy? I guess. But maybe if the dog came up with the emotion word, it'd be something completely different. Maybe the leaf cutter ant would call growing fungus for their babies something completely

Starting point is 00:07:21 different. But we call it agriculture. And agriculture is like the sort of like catch-all word for all of it, but maybe also just plants. No? I don't think so. I think agriculture also includes animal husbandry. Wait, what's horticulture? Is that the plant version of agriculture? I think horticulture is the subset that is plants. Well done, Sam. You really knocked it out of the park there. That makes it so that agriculture i think horticulture is the subset that is plants well done sam you you really you

Starting point is 00:07:46 really fit you really knocked it out of the park there that that makes it so that agriculture is definitely everything yeah somebody else thought of this a long time ago and said oh we need a new word what what should we call it planticulture no i think we should call it hort hort i think we should use the lesser known word for plants. Horts. Yeah. Gerald in the back of the room was coughing, like choking on his own water and went, hort, hort. And they were like, oh, Gerald, a great idea. That's a great, that sounds great. Horticulture. Everyone loves the word hort. Planticulture sounds stupid. Hort sounds smart.

Starting point is 00:08:26 Wow. So you don't know, actually, what it is, Harry. Yeah, did you do anything on this? No one really knows. No one knows where a farm comes from? Oh, I did do some research on where a farm comes from, but it is very mysterious, which

Starting point is 00:08:41 you wouldn't think for a word like farm. But all the sources that i found really just were like we we don't really know germanic saxon uncertain and disputed but it seems like where it's from is from the word the anglo-french for mayor f F-E-R-M-E-R, from ferm, F-E-R-M-E, which means a rent or a lease. Oh, what? So specifically,

Starting point is 00:09:13 it is about the idea that these lower classes would rent or lease land or work land that they did not own, like had a fixed settlement of this land land as opposed to anything to do with agriculture it was all the business side of it which is why i tried to include business in my definition right because apparently farming always has to do with like

Starting point is 00:09:39 the leasing of the land started out with a started out with a business thing interesting i i've looked up agriculture and horticulture in the meantime great agri agri comes from field hortus comes from garden so that's what that is and culture actually isn't like what we think of as culture but it comes from from the greek root for uh to grow so uh and that's so like that it's more like horticulture and agriculture are more the original definition of culture than the culture that we talk about. But that all comes from, I guess, society growing, I guess. We live in a

Starting point is 00:10:13 culture. It's just like a big winding field of ideas all threading together and being the thing that we exist inside of. On this medium that is a great big planet earth huh yeah and the internet speaking of the internet broadcasting also has farming origins uh that was the weirdest word for broadcasting uh was first and foremost an

Starting point is 00:10:37 agricultural method of sowing seeds so instead of planting them in rows you cast them and you broad broadly cast them and that was the first use of it and then later people were like man that's a good word and used it for print materials and any sort of distribution of information but when you're broadly casting culture so everything's related can you believe we're people? What a thing to get to be. Well, Sarah, I feel more informed on farming and agriculture and horticulture and broadly casting seed than I've ever been in my whole life. So that did the job of SciShow Tangents, and I appreciate it. I appreciate you for doing it.

Starting point is 00:11:19 That was a really nice thing to say. I feel appreciated. Great. And now that Sarah feels appreciated, it means it's time to move on to the quiz portion of our show, where I'm honestly rooting for her to lose. This week, we're going to be playing a game. It's called Farm or Tabled. So humans have tried to farm many, many things, from vegetables to alligators.

Starting point is 00:11:41 And while some of those attempts have been wildly successful, others have definitely not. So today, in honor of our wild successes and even more thrilling failures, we're going to be playing a version of this or that called farmed or tabled, where I'm going to talk about some kind of attempt that people have made to farm something. And you will have to say whether or not you think that that farm is still a farm or if it's been tabled. It's like farm table is that the joke that is yeah that's the joke yes thank you for thank you for putting it out there so that everyone would know all right round number one the american frog canning company was founded by albert brohl in the 1930s who claimed that his mother told him son if you want to make a success in life raise frogs my dad said a very similar thing to

Starting point is 00:12:26 me when i was a child by the way that he was like you should not that but with catfish he was like son catfish farming is going to be huge if you're ever looking for something to go into and he wasn't wrong catfish farming is huge uh but anyway so a little bit different i mean But anyway, it would have been different. I mean, Sari would still work for you, though. Oh, definitely. We'd be out there noodling with you. With our little waiters. Yeah, Sam would make videos

Starting point is 00:12:52 advertising our catfish and Sari would do science about them. So anyway, this dude started with a 100-acre farm in Ohio before moving to Louisiana for a more frog-friendly client. And climate with his farm, Brohl took advantage of the fact that a few breeding frogs can produce thousands of tadpoles

Starting point is 00:13:08 and farming them so that he could sell frog legs throughout the country. Based on his methods, Broll wrote, Frog raising for pleasure and profit to teach others how to create their own frog farms. Is the American Frog Canning Company still farming or has it been tabled? So canned frog legs, basically. That was the end product of this whole... Yeah, but yes, that's what he was selling then, but it could be that the farm is now selling something else. But it's definitely frogs. It's not something... Oh, and this is real. This is a real story.

Starting point is 00:13:42 Yeah, this isn't a truth or fail. That's the only for a loop. All that was real. Now you have to tell me if it still exists. I was going to say, I hope this man was real, but he was real. He was real. He did exist. Couldn't possibly still exist, though.

Starting point is 00:13:57 Have you never eaten frog legs? Well, yeah, I guess you got to get them from somewhere. I think I've only seen them on cartoons. I've eaten frog legs, but not like, but only because it was frog legs was the vibe. It was like, we're going to eat frog legs now. And that's going to be weird. It wasn't like a dish your mom was serving up to you every weeknight or something. No, it was not.

Starting point is 00:14:16 All I remember was a bunch of picnic tables all pushed together under a tent. That's what I remember of the time I ate frog legs. I think if you're eating frog legs still, I feel like they'd be fancy frog legs and you wouldn't get them out of a can. But I don't think that's true. I'm going to go with it still exists. Oh, I think it still exists, but I think because we need frogs for dissection.

Starting point is 00:14:36 I think there are a bunch of middle schoolers and I don't think we're running over enough frogs in good condition to use them for dissection. That's very clever, Sari. Well, Albert Brohl was a doctor who had to leave the medical profession due to his lack of license, so he decided to turn to frog farming. That's a good reason to leave the medical profession.

Starting point is 00:14:59 You still have time to leave your profession, Hank, and become a catfish farmer. I do. It had become a bit of a craze because it promised a way for people to make a lot of money with just a small pond. And he contributed to the craze with ads promising the tools of the trade. He argued that frog farming was good because everything in the wild wants to eat frogs, which must mean that frogs are delicious. But in fact, Broll actually got a lot of his frogs from frog hunters, not from farmers. And eventually, frog hunting caused a dent in the population of frogs, so much so that Louisiana passed a law that prevented people from hunting them, which meant that he had to shut down his company.

Starting point is 00:15:36 Now, in the 1980s, when I ate frog legs, frog farming began to pick up, especially in Europe, Brazil, and Southeast Asia, thanks to research on how to raise frogs in artificial ponds and get them to eat non-moving things. But most frog meat today is still from wild populations, which poses a threat to their numbers. So it does not exist anymore. Does not exist anymore. Unfortunately, he went out of business because of laws and regulations always messing with the free market. He should have done what Sari said.

Starting point is 00:16:05 Yeah, he didn't really try very hard at all. He cheated to start his farm. He didn't even really farm the frogs. Round number two, though. Snow farming. While commercial snowmaking equipment has been available since around the 1950s, not all ski resorts are able to use them. In the 1970s, theff sunshine village ski resort in

Starting point is 00:16:27 alberta canada decided to see if they could farm snow instead they started by setting up steel fence posts in the ground above the tree line in the summer and when the ground froze they added fencing material to act as a barrier that caught the snow as the wind blew it providing them with the valuable resource they needed to make the skiing possible. So is this Alberta snow farm still running as a farm, or do you think the idea has been tabled? Maybe I'm just a snow novice, but I don't spend a lot of time doing snow sport. I feel like it'd be very hard to move. Even it was touching a fence you would mess up the you wouldn't get that gnarly pow or whatever people say if you move it from a fence yeah it's gonna be a compacted and bad so i'm gonna say it's tabled but it might be better than fake than like manufactured snow even if it you know even if in in transport it loses something

Starting point is 00:17:24 they're not transporting it far, I would assume. Is that the case? Yeah, they do it at the resort. I think they still do it. The Banff Sunshine Village Ski Resort is one of the largest snow farms around. And it has been going since the 1970s and still exists. They set up more than 30 kilometers of snow fencing every winter. And they act like, kind of like trees at the lower parts of the resort they collect the snow have it pile up

Starting point is 00:17:50 and when there are big storms they go out hunting for what they call whales which are large mounds of snow and they find them and the crew members use skis and their own body weight sometimes even vehicles to pack down the whales and if there's enough snow to bury the fencing the steel rods get uh replaced with bamboo sticks uh as the fence to be set above the snow to gather even more snow so they're able to just collect all the snow up there and they keep it there but it's like more for for later when it's later in the season there'll be more snow there for longer so they farm it but they don't actually move it around, it seems like. Oh, weird. Okay. I wanted Sari to lose and it's working.

Starting point is 00:18:28 I'm psyched out thoroughly. All right, round number three, our last farm. Moose may be large and intimidating, but they also provide

Starting point is 00:18:37 valuable resources if you figure out a way to get them. In the 1960s, a farm was established in Kostroma, Russia with the goal of farming moose for

Starting point is 00:18:47 their milk, which was thought to provide a cure for peptic ulcers. Most of the year, the moose would wander around as wild animals, but as calving season approached, they would be lured in with oats so that the moose milkmaids can collect their salty, acidic milk.

Starting point is 00:19:04 So, is the moose farm still a farm, or has the idea been tabled? We got other ways to treat peptic ulcers now. We're not bothering moose. That's not sustainable. I don't think so. They're too scary. I feel like it's the most wonderful, wild idea. Once you start a moose farm farm you can't really stop it

Starting point is 00:19:26 because then you've got all these yes you can destroy your moose farm what happens when they come back for oats and you don't provide them with oats then that's when destruction happens you're in like a stable very precarious equilibrium where they mostly live their life on their own and then they come get ready to be milked eat some oats and then go back and it's goddess that does sound nice that does sound nice actually so what do you think

Starting point is 00:19:54 what are is it is it salmon no and series yes yeah yes that means we have a tie game in the end because it's real though I have some caveats because the the most recent article we could find about it was from 2014 but based on the content of the article and the fact that their website is still running and refers to tours you can tour it in 2022 we're assuming that it's

Starting point is 00:20:18 still going uh it has not been proven to cure ulcers and doctors usually discourage people from drinking cow's milk when they have ulcers because it can make the ulcers worse so that as far as we can tell is not a good reason to be doing this but here we have a quote from one of the dairy maids uh who worked at the farm in 2004 quote they are lovely creatures they really are much more interesting to deal with than cows but more dangerous as well. I was milking one of them when a motorbike passed by. She got scared, jumped right on top of me, and I had to be sent to the hospital. But this only goes to prove that you have to be really quick and alert when dealing with them.

Starting point is 00:20:56 She really meant no harm. Wow, what an optimistic person. This is a very detailed website. Faith is pointing out that there's a section of the website of photos called Cuddling. There's a whole section for that. How to raise a tame moose. Don't do any of this, people listening.

Starting point is 00:21:13 Don't sit and drink tea with your moose like these people are doing. Early spring is the only period while all the farm moose cows are prisoners in enclosures and must eat twigs only from this pile. I don't know why early spring, but they got to eat twigs only from this pile. They got to eat twigs only from this pile.

Starting point is 00:21:34 Okay, I'm in. But you have to go during the moose milking season. So that's important. The Ivan Susanian Sanatorium is the only recipient of moose milk. So they are only milking moose to give to a sanatorium. What are they doing over there? We don't need to ask any more questions. We must move on.

Starting point is 00:21:56 Okay. Yeah. So it's a tie game here at Suck Show Tangents. And next we're going to take a short break, and then it will be time for The Fact Off. Welcome back, everybody. Now get ready for the fact-off. Our panelists have brought science facts to present to me in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they have presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks any way I see fit. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. The oldest continually published periodical in North America is the Old Farmer's

Starting point is 00:22:45 Almanac, which goes back to 1792, and the 1863 edition had a circulation of around 225,000, thanks in part to its long-term weather forecasting. Everyone from brides planning their weddings to rabbis planning for the altar candles would write to ask about temperature and sunset conditions. So when a new editor in 1936 named Roger Scaife decided to get rid of the forecasts and replace them with average temperature and precipitation amounts, the decision was not popular. What was the circulation of the 1938 edition of the old Farmer's Almanac? So two years after they got rid of the forecasting. At its peak, it was 225 000 that's not as many as i would think that's a lot of people man yeah i suppose i suppose yeah

Starting point is 00:23:31 and that's not sure but everybody from brides to rabbis i would assume millions i still check it but you don't get like the almanac anymore i just google yeah farmer's almanac last frost the amount of people who pick it up in the grocery store and thumb through it is probably in the billions but yeah the people actually buy it not so much well there's only 30 there's only 30 million people in the u.s back in 1863 as well so keep that in mind i think word got around i think it was one third of whatever number you just said you're gonna going to have to do the math for me, buddy. Will you say the number one more time? Oh, my pencil.

Starting point is 00:24:08 225,000. You're going to do long division on your paper? What kind of tone was that to use with me? I did it for you. It's 74,000 is your guess. Yeah. That's the ticket. I already did it on my computer, and I just thought it was very silly that you filled out a pencil.

Starting point is 00:24:25 I think it was $150,000. I think it was higher. Well, remarkably enough, it dropped to $88,000. He was replaced in 1939, and the weather forecast soon returned. Take that out of here. Roger. You've got to know what your audience is looking for. Even if those forecasts are completely useless.

Starting point is 00:24:49 And so, Sam, you get to decide who goes first. Okay, I think I will go first. Does my story contain any science? I don't know. You be the judge. In 1783, an American revolutionary soldier was captured by the British and sent to a prison camp in the west indies once he got there he was given a slice of watermelon that was allegedly so mind-blowingly delicious that he kept the seeds from that slice and held on to them until he made it back to america now the revolutionary war ended in 1783 which was the year he went there so he didn't keep them for like years

Starting point is 00:25:18 or anything but still he made it back to america with the seeds and started growing them flash forward to 1840 when a farmer named nathaniel napford crossbred the West Indies melon with another species and created the Bradford melon. This melon was sweet, sometimes being compared to cotton candy both in taste and in texture. And in fact, it was demonstrably sweeter than other melons. The Bricks rating is a scientific measure of solids dissolved in liquids. It's often used to measure sugar content. And the Bricks rating of a Bradford is 12, while the normal watermelons is 10. And it also

Starting point is 00:25:51 had a thin, soft, easily peelable skin, more akin to another curcurbit. The cucumber. Curcurbit. Curcurbit, I think. Oh, cucurbit. That makes way more sense. Thank you. And its juice was used to make molasses and booze a great melon all around that sounds wonderful and the united states tended to

Starting point is 00:26:12 agree in the 1850s bradford sold his seeds for commercial use and they quickly became a hit so much of a hit in fact that the melons were a prime target for theft by both people who simply wanted to eat some really delicious watermelons and by organized melon wrestlers so to combat this watermelon farmers turned to classic defenses like shooting the thieves but they also used more unusual methods some farmers would poison random melons in their patches and they would put up a sign that said hey some of these are poisoned don't eat them that didn't seem to stop 100 of the melon stealing because there were newspaper articles reporting incidents like one in Buffalo where six children were killed by a poison watermelon that they stole. And even reports of watermelon farmers and their families dying from eating the wrong melon, like just forgetting which watermelon they had. By 1880, there are even articles alleging that some watermelon farmers had electrified the melons in their field.

Starting point is 00:27:05 A melon thief would touch the melon, get electrocuted, and die. It got so bad that for several years, more people were killed stealing watermelons than any other agricultural product aside from cattle. Eventually, though modernity caught up with the Bradford melon, produce started to be shipped really far distances by trains, and Bradfords with their soft skins did not hold up well to that kind of environment, especially compared to your average super thick shelled watermelon. So capitalism sent the Bradford to fruit Valhalla along with the Gros Michel banana, except there was one little patch of watermelons in the Bradford family's backyard where they kept growing the melons after that for decades. And even to the point where

Starting point is 00:27:45 they themselves forgot that their melons were like the biggest fruit of all time people used to die for them yeah but in the 90s uh nat bradford who's the sixth great grandson of the original nathaniel bradford found a book from the 1850s that i guess ranked how good fruits and vegetables of the time were. He went to the watermelon page and saw that number one was the Bradford melon. So he reached out to a scientist who specialized in heritage seeds, learned everything that I just said, and started commercially growing Bradfords again. And you can buy seeds and whole fruit, except this year because the 2022 crop

Starting point is 00:28:21 of these poor delicate melons was destroyed by rain. I couldn't get any this year but i can i could i could maybe get a bradford melon or i could get bradford melon seeds and i could grow my own definitely get seeds yeah it seems like you could grow them a lot of places because there was people in buffalo growing them people all over the country growing them my goodness that's exciting by a genuine bradford watermelon only. How did they electrify the melons? Are plants conductive? There was newspaper articles from the 1800s

Starting point is 00:28:50 that were like, somebody got zapped by a melon. I don't think there's any contemporary explanation of how that was the case. It's not a lot of science. You were right about that. All right, Sari, I loved that um what do you got so when humans farm animals for food we don't perfectly recreate what it's like for that animal to grow up in the wild and those changes can have consequences that we don't anticipate for example

Starting point is 00:29:18 farmed salmon aren't fed krill and shrimp so their their flesh lacks the reddish-orange pigment and is a pale whitish-gray instead, unless farmers specifically add that pigment to their food. But other changes in farmed salmon are a little less obvious and a lot weirder, scientifically speaking. As early as the 1960s, fish scientists noticed that something was odd about the sagittal otoliths of farmed salmon. So these otoliths are basically tiny rocks that jangle around in the inner ear of bony fishes, and they help with hearing and balance. And in wild salmon, sagittal otoliths are usually made from a crystalline form of calcium carbonate called aragonite. Occasionally, their otoliths are made of a less stable form called vaterite, which doesn't jiggle in the same way and causes around a 28 to 50% loss of functionality.

Starting point is 00:30:10 And farmed salmon are up to 10 times more likely to have vaterite otoliths instead of aragonite, so they have significantly worse hearing and balance than wild salmon. salmon. Some researchers thought this had to do with the hatchery tank environment being so noisy, the lack of enrichment for growing salmon, or a side effect of generations of selective breeding. But it turns out, according to a 2016 study, it found that these abnormal otoliths probably come from making farmed salmon grow as fast as possible. In salmon that they studied that were the same age, the biggest fast-growing fish had three times as much vaterite in their ears as the smallest, slower-growing fish. And we still don't understand the nuances of how these otoliths crystallize, but it's pretty clearly linked to growth rate. And these study authors worry that causing mass hearing loss in farmed salmon may

Starting point is 00:31:02 limit conservation efforts because you can't just release a bunch into the wild and expect them to survive, which was one thought to help replenish salmon populations. A separate 2021 study that I found tried to study this question and concluded that the bigness of the farmed salmon kind of counteracted their lack of hearing and made them less likely to be preyed upon than smaller salmon. But they specifically studied farmed salmon in Norway and like other fish that eat fish as opposed to other predators. And one paper's experiment isn't necessarily conclusive. In general, the moral of the story is farming revolutionized a lot of things and can be good to help with overfishing or food insecurity but whenever we change how living things grow there are usually weird unintended consequences like with ear rocks wow are there like clear problems with the salmon like they have a hard time telling up and down or

Starting point is 00:31:57 hearing and like clap in front of them be like hey can you hear me they like they might behave a little bit differently and like be less responsive but i think most of the tests that i was reading assume that there is this hearing loss um and that the environments are just so different that we we haven't like put a a hearing fish and a half hearing fish together and clapped or splashed it's time for that research sari we need to go get some farmed salmon and some wild salmon i don't know how we're gonna do it you gotta lure them with oats yeah catfish farmer hank would know that's yeah you would definitely know in my alternate life i would know all about this

Starting point is 00:32:42 yeah you could be making tiktoks about catching salmon and you'd be just as big of a hit as you are now. If not bigger. It'd be so much fun. I'd do dances with them. It would be great. That would be great, yeah. That's not what we have to decide today. Today we have to decide whether Sam or Sari's fact was better because they came in with a tie and i think that a watermelon that that peep that that men would

Starting point is 00:33:05 murder for has to be the winner of today's episode of scishow tangents congratulations sam i'm gonna go buy some bradford watermelon seeds right now and get them shipped to my house they're only ten dollars oh wow you can make so many watermelons from that i'm gonna come steal them hank so you better you better start poisoning get my watermelon my watermelon poison out. Get your poison ready. But remember which ones are poisoned. Most important part. That's vital. That's vital. It does seem important. And now it's time to ask the science couch, where we've got a listener question for our couch of finely honed scientific minds.

Starting point is 00:33:40 Emily 17 on Discord asks, are there any animals that sort of do agriculture? Definitely, yes, in some way. We've talked about this, I think, even on Tangents. But there are definitely animals who have relationships where they intentionally grow other organisms to consume. Like leafcutter ants are the most most obvious example they don't eat the leaves they take the leaves back and then fungus grows on the leaves and then they eat the fungus i think yeah ants got little animals they got little plants um but the one that i wanted to talk about that i learned about recently is the first non-human mammalian farmers we've seen it a lot in insects but uh pocket gophers we've

Starting point is 00:34:28 known for a while eat roots of plants they they are small rodents they have extensive tunnel systems and they tunnel around and then as roots dangle into the tunnels they they munch on the roots that's where they get their nutrients from and now we have evidence that they not only dig around their tunnels to find roots but try and maintain those tunnels and like fiercely defend them in order to maintain that root growth so they like spread their own poop as fertilizer throughout the tunnels and really like carve out different areas and promote those plants growing above the tunnels so that they can eat the roots later on. They don't plant the crops. They don't go around and like planting the seeds, but

Starting point is 00:35:17 they kind of nurture the plants through the way that they know how by spreading poop as opposed to having a dedicated toilet space or something like that. I think it's really cute. And in the press release for it, there's a video of a plant just disappearing underground, which would be very freaky if I was a human on the surface and not a scientist watching this video. But it's like the gopher eating the roots and then just goes and disappears. That's so cute. from eating the roots and then just goes whoop and disappears that's so cute you know like i'd say i'd say 60 of photos of pocket gophers are cute their teeth can be a little challenging they're little bear hands oh i love that human hands i love a big digging hand i think that's

Starting point is 00:36:00 fun yeah they're cute i i declare they're. That's really what it comes down to is there's a lot of expertise shared around this room, but Sari knows what's cute and what's not cute. So long story short, yeah, there's tons of animals that are doing agriculture. Definitively answered. A little different than us in that there tends to be a pretty strong specialization to do one kind of agriculture, whereas we do every kind we could possibly imagine. We got lots of cool trucks that can do all kinds of stuff. Gator farms and moose farms.

Starting point is 00:36:33 Frog legs, shovel arms. That's the thing. They got less cool tools to do. They got their mouths to chew and their poop to spread. And that's about it. Well, if you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week. Or you can join the SciShow Tangents Patreon

Starting point is 00:36:50 and ask us on Discord. Thank you to Willow on Discord and at TomMGaunt1 and everybody else who asked us your questions for this episode. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's so easy to do that. You can go to patreon.com slash SciShow Tangents and become a patron. You get access to things like our newsletter, bonus episodes,

Starting point is 00:37:08 and special thanks to patrons John Pollock and Les Aker. Thank you so much for your support. Second, you can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's very helpful and it helps us know what you like about the show. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, you can just tell people about us.

Starting point is 00:37:24 Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz. Our wonderful associate producer is Faith Schmidt. Our editor is Seth Glicksman. Our story editor is Alex Billow. Our social media organizer is Julia

Starting point is 00:37:39 Buzz Bazaio. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound designer is Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our executive producers are Caitlin Hoffmeister and me, Hank Green. And of course, we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be

Starting point is 00:37:56 lighted. But one more thing. Farmers regularly use nutrient-rich manure from animals to help fertilize crops. And historically, in regions of East and South Asia, communities of people used pig poop fertilizer that was made from digested human poop. Humans would sit on holes in an elevated building and their poop would be funneled down and mixed with other food in the pig pen below. This poop recycling initiative helped limit the spread of disease from human waste and it helped create nutrient rich fertilizer that was better than straight up human poop. But it wasn't perfect as some parasites and other diseases can be transmitted between pigs and humans.

Starting point is 00:38:48 So today, these pig toilets have largely been replaced by more sanitary structures. At least we're mixing it with other food for them. I need you to explain more if what I am understanding is what I am understanding. They poop into a thing and then the poop would get mixed with food, and then fed to pigs. Yeah, and pigs would eat the poop, and then the pigs would poop the poop.

Starting point is 00:39:10 Poop a better poop? They'd poop a better poop, yeah. Think of the pigs like a filter. No, don't put the poop in the pig food. They don't mind. They probably love it. A first for a little while. Not long term.

SciShow Tangents - Farming

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